Janis Paige, a lively redhead who starred in the Broadway show The Pajama Game and movies like Silk Stockings and Romance on the High Seas, has died at 101 years old. She was discovered in the 1940s at the Hollywood Canteen and passed away from natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, according to her friend Stuart Lampert.
Paige had her own TV sitcom, It’s Always Jan, in 1955-56, where she played a widowed nightclub singer raising her 10-year-old daughter. She also appeared on TV shows like Eight Is Enough and Trapper John, M.D. In 1976, she guest-starred on All in the Family as a waitress who tempts Archie to cheat and on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as an old flame of Lou’s.
In 1968, she took over the lead role from Angela Lansbury in the Broadway show Mame and performed for nearly two years. After working on stage and TV, she starred in the movie Silk Stockings (1957) with Fred Astaire, where they performed the song-and-dance number “Stereophonic Sound.”
Paige starred in the original Broadway production of The Pajama Game, which premiered in 1954 and won the Tony Award for best musical. She played Babe Williams, a factory worker who falls for the new superintendent, despite their labor dispute.
She was replaced by Doris Day in the 1957 movie version of The Pajama Game. Paige and Day had previously worked together in Romance on the High Seas (1948) and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960).
Paige’s third husband was Ray Gilbert, who wrote the lyrics for the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Disney’s Song of the South (1946). Born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington, on September 16, 1922, Paige moved to Los Angeles after high school and began singing at the Hollywood Canteen. She was signed by MGM and then Warner Bros., making her movie debut in Bathing Beauty (1944).
Paige starred in several films in the late 1940s and early 1950s and later appeared on Broadway. She also played roles in TV shows like Wagon Train, The Rockford Files, Happy Days, and soap operas like Capitol and General Hospital.
Paige participated in Bob Hope’s USO tours and released an album in 1956. She published a memoir in 2020 and donated her career memorabilia to Emerson College. She was married three times: to Frank Martinelli Jr., Arthur Stander, and Ray Gilbert, who passed away in 1976. She inherited Gilbert’s Ipanema Music Corp., which he founded with Brazilian musician Antônio Carlos Jobim.